


the children of cronos

by villanelle



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Gen, Shiganshina Trio
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-29
Updated: 2014-11-29
Packaged: 2018-02-27 09:41:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2688047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/villanelle/pseuds/villanelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They were three sisters, suckled on madness, consumed with power, and still paralyzed in the unrelenting cycle of time.</p>
<p>Sina, Rose, and Maria. Before they were legends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the children of cronos

**Author's Note:**

> Thanksgiving boredom drove me to basically sketch out and play with some snk theories, most notably stuff related to the Coordinate ability, time looping, and the walls themselves.

_part 1: the one who ruled_

 

Sina was the jewel of the family, her visage symmetrically cut and arranged, her eyes vivid like beryl gems that shifted between viridescent to aquamarine in differing intensities of light.

Theirs was a humble family, tied for centuries to the land. The deliverance of three daughters, one after another with no interruption of sons, would have provoked most farmers to bemoan a lack of good fortune and perhaps surrender at least one babe to the wolves.

Their father however, had other plans for them. He kept and raised all three of his offspring, even as a single parent. Soon after the birth of the third child, his wife, regarded by most of the villagers as a woman of strange habits, had started embarking on daily walks in the woodland periphery, though her breasts were still milk-heavy and her back still strained. One day, she didn’t come home, and the sparsely-manned search party found only scraps of her skirt punctured on nettle. From the savage ripping of the cloth, they determined that she must have met her fate at the talons of one of the larger beasts.

Investing his hopes into his most beautiful daughter, the father forbade Sina from laboring her hands, both in the field and in the house, all the while dreaming of her marrying the landlord who owned much of the surrounding acreage, or the herdsman whose flocks covered the green of entire hills. Even the local miller, whose table was never bare, would have been acceptable.

Sina herself came to crave rising even higher, turning down one suitor with a crisp clarification that she would settle for nothing less than a prince. Her spurned would-be husband committed himself to a pejorative vendetta until the whole village was laughing at her father’s foolishness for inflating the daughter’s head to such lofty heights.

Rose and Maria did not laugh though. Every word that spilled from their sister’s coral lips, they believed. Perhaps, because they couldn’t help it.

Despite all the praise lavished on Sina’s eyes and her hands, softer than those of a lordling’s wife, Rose and Maria regarded their sister’s silver tongue as her most precious attribute.

In fact, Maria’s strongest memory of her sister involved the display of that gift. Playing in the arboreal border where village outskirts met the vast forest, Maria had gazed longingly and repeatedly at another girl’s dress, the weave so freshly and brightly dyed unlike that of the hand-me-downs she wore.

“Would you like to have such a dress?” Sina asked, even though it seemed like a nonsensical question considering how their father’s plot of land had produced only meager yields as of late.

“Yes,” Maria confessed in a small voice before smiling at her sister with genuine confidence. “But I can wait until you become a princess.”

“Good answer, my love, but no sister of mine should have to wait for a dress.”

Turning to the other girl who was starting to back away like a creature on the threshold of entrapment, Sina commanded, “Take off the dress and place it at my sister’s feet.”

To Maria, it sounded simply ludicrous. The girl was the landlord’s daughter from his first marriage, and there was no way she would lay anything at the feet of a farmer’s child. But the girl obeyed, smiling vapidly and fixing a disconcerting gaze on Maria. Pulling the dress up and jerkingly over her head, she relinquished it so that the cloth settled over Maria’s earth-smudged toes. 

Sina leaned forward to pluck the wildflower crown off the girl’s head as well. “Now go home and take the long way. If anyone asks you what happened to your dress, you’re to forget about gifting it and to tell them that you took it off to dance naked in the woods.”

Yet again, the girl strangely complied, wandering off with a drunken, maladroit gait but seemingly unconcerned by her complete nudity. Returning her attention to her sister, Sina adjusted and fussed over the folds of the dress in a motherly fashion while Maria tried very hard not to flinch. Sina noticed how tense she was anyway.

“Don’t worry,” she assured her. “I would never use it on you or Rose.”

Later that day, the villagers were noisily consumed with trading reports of how the landlord’s daughter had stumbled past numerous houses, exposed and _smiling_ , until she half-collapsed on her father’s doorstep. The girl, Maria subsequently found out, was to be locked into her room for the next few years with her father vowing to rehabilitate his child from heathen behavior.

Maria was too ashamed to ever wear the dress again.

 

* * *

 

Many more suitors arrived to ask for Sina’s hand, a succession of farmers promising to always bring home bountiful harvests, carpenters swearing to build her a whole house, and even a few minor lords whispering that they could overlook her poor pedigree. Dissatisfied and restless, she took to venturing furtively into the woods, farther than any of the villagers dared to go, tied to the land as they were. Treading in her thin shoes through the dense morass of moist soil and mossy tree roots, she came to know the forest labyrinth like a dryad who belonged there.

And one day, she faintly heard movement that was much less lightly-stepped than hers as well as an unfamiliar, masculine voice cursing “-- damn animal got away again!”

A horsed rider crashed through the bramble, and Sina’s eyes rose to meet those of a young man. His boots, though mud-coated midway along the calf, were of noticeably fine leather, buckled with gold. His hands were protected from the drag of the reins by the same material. His mouth had a slight curl of cockiness though it softened as he looked at her.

“I didn’t expect to find a lass in these parts.”

“What did you expect to find?”

“The wild game I was hoping to hunt. Perhaps though, this is a better discovery.”

She smiled at him, her eyes more bewitchingly green than all the lush flora around them. “I’ve never met a real hunter. The farmers in my village just wait for the occasional lost creature at the edge of the woods.”

“Well, I’m no farmer. I’m the eldest son of House Jaeger.”

_Oh_ , she pondered. _At last, a prince._

“Now, what about you?” he asked. “What’s your name?”

“Sina, and my father’s name is Reiss.”

 

* * *

 

_part 2: the one who reversed_

 

What Rose wanted most in the world was to stay close to Sina. Their mother was dead, their father neglectful of the two children who weren’t his favorite, and Maria grew increasingly distant with age. So Rose clung to Sina whose eyes were more beautiful than anyone else’s and whose words always came true.

The day Sina was late in returning from the woods, Rose broke down crying in front of her father, wondering if the same beast that took her mother had ripped away a part of their family again.

“Nonsense,” her father said though he paced the threshold of their home like a haunted man. “There was no such beast.”

Before she could ask her father what he meant by that, a rippling cheer, celebratory in tone, reached their ears. When they rushed out of the house, they gaped, as slack-jawed and speechless as their neighbors, at what they saw. Like a fairy tale princess, Sina emerged from the forest, riding on the back of a steed more magnificent than any in the village and her arms clutching the waist of someone who was surely not a farmer.

The curve of her smile did not remain content for very long though.

Sina had dreamed once of becoming a princess; now, she aspired to becoming a queen.

Her princeling husband’s family looked towards her with pursed lips and disdainful eyes at first, but she gradually won them over. The widespread vassals of House Jaeger were a different story entirely. They grumbled in their respective castles, and whispers of fortifications growing ever more indomitable added to fears of war sundering the land again.

Riding with her sister to a highland crest one cool spring morning, Rose found her breath stolen away by how much vastness stretched out below them. In the distance, she could see curls of smoke arising like lyrical music notes over the colossal walls of a rival lord’s fortress.

“I can’t imagine that any ordinary man will be much help in a siege against that,” Rose remarked to her sister. “Your army would have to consist of the children of gods.”

“Like the forest folk that Papa used to tell us about,” Sina softly agreed. “The ones who awaken with the hardened skin of trees and whose limbs are like branches that block out the sun.”

That very night, Sina began to consult the court alchemist and spent many weeks thereafter overseeing the man’s work. Sometimes, Rose visited her sister there, though the stench of sulphur and other elements inflamed her lungs like poison. Before Sina’s arrival at court, most would have regarded such practices as evidence of an unbalanced mind. Sina persuaded them otherwise. She fed her father-in-law condensed pills of mercury on a golden spoon, toasted her guests with goblets of cinnabar-reddened wine, and feasted her soldiers on carefully fatted cattle.

With the eventual death of House Jaeger’s patriarch, Sina became queen over an ever-expanding domain, no longer the hidden jewel of a small backwoods family but the jewel of an empire.

At one point though, she came very close to losing it all.

A rebellious liegeman stormed their stronghold, breaching their defenses with the scream of steel sliding against steel. Rose, still young and untouched by war thus far, found herself unable to flee quickly enough, crumpling at her queenly sister’s feet while trying futilely to stop her wounds from flowing.

Sina clutched her red, wet hand with a desperate grip. “It cannot happen like this,” she muttered. “They must not steal the serum.”

Rose’s last thought before the darkness swarmed her vision was that the smoke and blood of war reminded her much of the vapors and liquids in the alchemist’s cellar.

But for all three of the sisters, it didn’t end there.

Opening her eyes, Rose found her view half-shaded from foliage, shafts of light peeking through the clusters of leaves. Underneath her was a soft, dewy bed of azuline, star-petaled flowers and blades of grass that tickled her cheeks. Within arm’s reach of her was Sina, adolescent limbs languid in sleep under a peaceful blue sky.

_I’ve been here before_ , Rose thought, but that feeling faded away.

 

* * *

 

Neither Rose’s mind nor her body remembered exactly how many times she has died for her sister.

The inklings of awareness, of recognition, of having been somewhere before came irregularly, and she dismissed them as headaches. Sina referred to them excitedly as premonitions. Maria said nothing at all.

Although Rose felt that many experiences were peculiarly familiar, she also sensed that some were not. The walls of her sister’s cities grew taller and the distance between them divisively greater. In contrast, the availability of books became scarcer and the topography of maps ever more reduced. It wasn’t that Rose loved her sister any less with time, but that allegiance tarnished with the feeling that everything new was not quite right.

She decided to build a life apart from her sister’s. At odds with Sina who had wedded a prince, Rose chose a farmer, tying herself back to the land.

His name was Ackerman, and they lived happily for many years in spite of less refined conditions.

Until Sina came to their door, sweetly asking one last request.

 

* * *

 

For Rose, there is no more falling to war or goring by beast or even death by old age.

All that remains is drugged half-consciousness, a dry vacuum of sentience encased in stone.

 

* * *

 

_part 3: the one who remembered_

 

Between the three sisters, Maria was the only one who retained the full weariness of having lived nearly fifty cycles, each time tweaked until Sina achieved the kingdom built on bones that she wanted. During the first ten life spans, Maria revealed to her sisters the curse that they were reliving, thinking surely that they would want it to end as much as she did. Her divulgement only emboldened Sina's aggression and cruelty, a suzerain without an afterlife to answer to. After that, Maria swallowed her words, wondering if things would turn out differently.

Unlike Rose, she mostly avoided Sina’s circle of alchemists and apothecaries, clerics and charlatans. But she could not plug her ears from all the rumors.

“They say your soldiers’ diet consists of unnatural meat,” she mentioned once at her sister’s table. “Some even say human meat.”

Sina laughed with an incarnadine mouth. “That’s not unnatural at all. You need only to look at nature to find an example.”

The queen’s eyes were still jewel-like, but colder and darker now, more malachite than beryl. “Or you could just look in a mirror.”

Throat constricted, stomach in knots, Maria pushed her plate away and demanded, “What do you mean?”

“Oh you silly child, did you actually believe a beast devoured Mother?”

 

* * *

 

From the fortieth cycle onwards, Maria initiated one action and failed many a time to see it through.

She padded on slippered feet into the crypts where her sister retained prisoners of war, sneaking past guards and other bolted cells to the inmate that frightened her the most. On several occasions, she ran away from the enormous cage, cursing at herself for such cowardice but consistently unable to see anything past that monstrous face. The night after Sina revealed to her their origins, Maria made it all the way down to that dungeon, which strangely enough, smelled of mold and dank air but remained free of the odors of piss and excrement. 

The specimen still horrified her, its face curtained by thick bestial hair, its bodily proportions unshapely with elongated arms and a cranium that seemed a few sizes too small. She forced herself to stare long and hard, and the eyes that peered back at her looked almost human.

“Listen to me,” the thing spoke. Its voice was unpleasant to the ear, words grinded out and dissonant, the muscles of its throat clearly out of tune.

The voice was however, vaguely familiar. Even as a human, he had not been a man of many words.  _He_ was the alchemist, she realized, the very first one Sina had recruited.

“Listen to me,” he repeated. “Your sister is the monster.”

With shaking, disloyal hands, Maria freed him.

 

* * *

 

Sina was an ageless queen, a mother who survived both sons and grandsons. Whatever rot lay beneath her skin was veiled by a face and form that remained serenely smooth, a flower in perpetual bloom. 

Her great-grandsons were less inclined to wait out their lifetimes though, and Maria found herself journeying back to the inner walls when she heard that the queen was on her deathbed. On a spread of condemning black, Sina appeared already a corpse. The boys who inherited her ambition had cleaved off her hand in a way so that the tissue did not rejuvenate for once, and Maria wondered if that meant all of Sina’s ability was gone with her departed and decaying flesh.

“Sister,” Sina said. Maria had forgotten that the queen's voice could sound anything other than imperious. “Help me, my love. Save me.”

Throughout their fifty lifetimes, Maria had feigned a lack of power. She had swayed to Sina’s authority and had acted oblivious to the alterations in memory. No one remembered what happened to Rose, not even her husband and children. 

No one except for Maria.

And so she thought it fitting when she turned away from her sister’s remaining outstretched hand.

She buried Sina, still alive, in the walls that bore her name.

 

* * *

 

_part 4: the children_

 

Nine times out of ten, Armin waits for Mikasa to meet Eren first. He tried introducing himself before Eren once. It didn’t turn out well. Someone followed him, and Mikasa died on the same floor as her parents.

The cycle reset in a way that took longer to fix.

By now, Armin has decided that he needs Mikasa to first intersect paths with Eren and to experience that key jolt of power, a unique signal traveling across synapses faster than even the activation of fight-or-flight epinephrine. He needs for her to begin experiencing headaches, for her to gradually recognize this and that. Armin half-hopes that she will one day recognize him.

Ten times out of eleven, Armin comes dangerously close to losing Eren, or at least, the one he needs. Once, it was a slow march towards starvation before they even entered the Survey Corps. Another time, it was a contamination in the serum that caused Eren’s titan form to regress, forgetting its humanity.

Armin was left with no choice but to engineer the death of their trio's third member and reset the cycle again.

Misery taints him with each revolution of the hourglass, his eyes still bright but looking less and less like those of a child each successive turn. He evolves into a seasoned actor to compensate, calibrating each hitch of the voice when painting a vision of the world beyond the walls for his two friends. He needs them to believe in that world, to pursue wholeheartedly the freedom that will come with it.

Knowing what has occurred and what will occur again carries its own sort of bittersweet comfort however. He doesn’t mind reading them the stories, doesn’t mind choosing the Survey Corps repeatedly with them. Even Mikasa’s death no longer brings him despair because he knows he will see her again.

Nevertheless, despite his yearning for lands and seas that he hasn’t yet encountered, Armin fears the unknown. The rhythm of his heart skips a beat whenever the cycle progresses further than it has before.

They are at such a crossroads right now.

Two families, once intertwined, now divided. One house enthroned, the other pushed out to the brink of the known world.

A Reiss daughter and a Jaeger son.

 

 

The cycle resets.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently, it's been suggested in an interview that the friendship between Eren and Armin will crumble by the end and that is terrifyingly tragic to me.


End file.
